


The Gift of Music

by trustingHim17



Series: Rekindling Hope [4]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen, Hidden Talents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:07:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24828823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustingHim17/pseuds/trustingHim17
Summary: Watson rarely hated his shoulder wound more than when he heard someone play the viola.
Series: Rekindling Hope [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1776541
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	The Gift of Music

I hurried away from the street performer who had set up on my route home, missing my own instrument too much to enjoy listening to someone else play right then. It had been hard enough recently listening to Holmes, who was such an amazing violinist. Listening to the violist who was closer to student than master rankled me. The boy was young and playing something simple, but the worst part was the carelessness with which he handled the viola. Once, he had nearly knocked it against the building behind him, and I had tensed.

I itched to show the lad how one was _supposed_ to handle the instrument, and I forced myself to walk away, my longing to play again almost painful. Turning my steps towards home, I lost myself in the bustle of the crowd. I didn’t relax until the music faded from hearing.

It had been several years since I had last longed for my instrument so much. I had played frequently before joining the Army, loving the music I could make with my viola, an instrument similar in appearance to a violin, but larger and that played in a slightly lower pitch. My brother had never been interested in an instrument of his own, but he had supported me enthusiastically—at times too enthusiastically.

A faint smile flickered across my face as I thought of my brother. We had been close before my parents had died in that accident. We did everything together, and, while Harry had no interest in learning an instrument of his own, he had never missed a chance to hear me play, even in the beginning, when I was still learning. The two of us had spent hours wandering through the fields together, he searching for things to draw and me playing random tunes on my viola.

I had used that instrument for everything. It was a calm in the storm, an expression of my mood, a distraction, a comfort, a hobby, a pastime. I usually played established pieces, mostly modern and local folk songs, but, occasionally, I could improvise a tune to suit my need, though I was rarely as good at improvisation as Holmes.

I sighed. I had no idea what had gotten me thinking about my instrument after so many years, but the longing was driving me to distraction. It was only a matter of time before Holmes noticed, and I needed to find a way to avoid that. He had been overly wary of any change since I caught a nasty fever a few months back, and as I had never told him about the loss of my own instrument, he may misinterpret my distraction as ill health.

I refused to spend another beautiful day cooped inside like an invalid, especially since I could no longer play. Even my books were losing their appeal, I had read them so many times in the last few weeks.

Arriving at Baker Street, I set down the umbrella I hadn’t needed and walked up the stairs, listening for any sign that Holmes was home, but the flat was silent. He was between cases as far as I knew, but it was rare for him to be so quiet. Usually, he was a flurry of movement as he tried to keep himself occupied. I had almost decided he had gone out for whatever reason when I opened the door to the sitting room.

Holmes stood in front of the fireplace with his back to me, holding his instrument in the wrong hand, and I momentarily froze in the doorway.

“Since when can you play with your left hand?” I asked as I walked toward my desk to drop my bag.

Holmes spun around at my voice, and I carefully blanked my expression. Holmes wasn’t holding his violin left-handed; the instrument was too big. He was holding a viola. The longing to play hit me all over again, and I set my bag down in its place and turned to leave. I would go to my club for the evening before I listened to Holmes teach himself to play my instrument with his left hand.

“Where are you going?” he asked from behind me.

“Appointment,” I replied shortly, not wishing to detail why I had no wish to watch him play. I caught my fingers twitch in an A major, and I clenched my hand into a fist, walking back towards the door.

“Watson.”

I stopped a pace from the door, listening but refusing to look at the viola. The worst part of my shoulder wound had been the loss of the instrument that had given me so much joy over the years. I simply couldn’t watch Holmes teach himself to play the instrument I could play with my eyes closed, if only my shoulder would cooperate.

The longing for my instrument that I had thought to leave behind on the walk home returned, nearly painful in its intensity. How I missed being able to play!

“Watson, the viola is not mine.”

Oh, good. I nearly sighed in relief. He had borrowed it from someone, and he would have to give it back eventually. I hoped it was sooner, rather than later.

“It is yours.”

Wait, what? Why would he have bought me a viola? He didn’t even know I could play!

“Watson?”

I realized I was still silently staring at the door. “I can’t play,” I told him. _I can’t hold it_ , I meant.

“Yes, you can.”

I would not argue about it. How he had deduced I knew how to play, I had no idea, but knowledge and ability were two very different things. My shoulder refused to support the weight of the viola. I had no idea how many times I had tried before finally putting my instrument away forever. I had sold it before moving to Baker Street. I took another step and opened the door.

“You are not solely right-handed, Watson. Bow with your other arm.”

Bow with my other arm? Hold the instrument _wrong_? But…

I forced myself to stop and think, to separate my instructor’s voice insisting that the bow belonged in my dominant hand from the reality of the situation. Why couldn’t I play left-handed? I would need to change the strings around, as well as a few of the pieces inside the body, but theoretically, a viola _could_ be played left-handed, though I knew of no one who actually _did_ so. There was too much of a stigma against using the left hand. I would likely have to hide it, but to be able to play again…

I hesitated a moment longer, then turned around. Holmes still stood near the hearth, watching me with a steady gaze.

“What makes you think I can even play?” I asked, keeping my gaze firmly _away_ from the instrument I missed so much.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “You mean aside from the circle of fifths your left hand is currently running through?”

I clenched my fist again, stilling the beginner’s drill I was doing without thought, and waited for him to continue.

“You spent over an hour playing on nothing when you were sick,” he told me, “and muttered the rest of the time about the loss of your instrument. Once I realized you were running through fingerings a fifth off of what I play,” he gestured the bow towards his violin on the end table, “it was a simple matter to deduce that you played the viola.” He paused a moment, staring at me as my gaze kept drifting toward the instrument he held, before he continued. “That you were able to finger correctly without a viola in a time when you did not even recognize me showed that you had been an experienced player before your shoulder wound.”

I nodded, forcing myself not to flex my bad shoulder. It had been a rare thing indeed to see me without the viola in my younger years, and being unable to play had made for many long, quiet nights before—and even after—I had moved to Baker Street.

He held the instrument out to me, and I took it gingerly, first in my left hand, the way I was accustomed, then switching it to my right, where I could actually hold it. The viola was a fine one, resembling my childhood instrument so closely I would have looked inside for my mark if I hadn’t known the impossibility of that. I ran my fingers over the body, checking for flaws. The wood was a fine mixture of spruce and maple, with no knots that could disrupt the sound, and the fingerboard a hard ebony. All the strings appeared to be in tune, though they had been reversed for left-handed play. Inside, I saw that the bass bar and sound post had also been reversed. Either Holmes had altered a standard viola, either by himself or by using the services of a luthier, which took quite a bit of time and work, or he had searched the city for a specially crafted left-handed viola. Everything I saw, including the tiger stripes decorating the back, seemed to point to a high-end instrument, and I wondered where Holmes had gotten it. An instrument such as this would not have been cheap or easy to find.

I looked up to find Holmes watching me, patient for once as I examined the viola, as every musician should examine a new instrument. I realized I had again given away my musical experience and gave him a wry grin before positioning the viola awkwardly on my right shoulder. I knew all the fingerings and bowing positions, but transferring the muscle memory to the other hand would take some time.

He picked up his violin, played the simplest version of the circle of fifths, and raised an eyebrow at me, daring me to copy it.

I ignored him for the moment as I silently ran through the first position fingerings a few times, wanting to grow accustomed to the new stance before filling the flat with howling cats and nails on a chalkboard. With a few repetitions, my fingers gained a bit of muscle memory, and I started running through the second position, then the third, all silently. It would take time to play at my old ability, but I had been an experienced enough player to quickly transfer the fingerings to the other hand. It was more a matter of getting my fingers to hold the new positions than it was learning the positions themselves.

When I had run through the fingerings several times to get an idea of how they should feel with my right hand, I carefully bowed a simple first position double stop.

The sound rang out clear and true, and I made no attempt to kill the grin that crossed my face at the first bit of music I had made in over fifteen years. I tried another tentative double stop, then strung two together, and the sound filled the flat. My grin widened, and the room and Holmes both faded from my awareness as I experimented with more double stops, eventually moving on to second and third positions. Some of those fingerings were harder to force my right hand to create, but repeating the fingering several times eventually resulted in a clear sound, and I moved on to the next ones as my fingers remembered the positions I had learned so long ago.

At some point, my protesting leg forced me to lean against the arm of the settee, but I looked up from my experimentation only when I recognized a second set of notes harmonizing with mine.

Holmes still leaned against the hearth, holding his violin and watching me as I ran through the fingerings, and my grin of delight turned a bit more sheepish as I realized I had completely ignored him for several minutes. I opened my mouth to thank him when he played a quick tune, and I grinned in reply, realizing my enjoyment of the instrument was all the thanks he needed.

I copied the tune, mostly, adding higher-pitched notes at the end to turn the somewhat jaunty tune into more of an expression of gratitude.

He sent another one back, one somewhat more complicated, and we began tossing tunes back and forth. The tunes got steadily more complicated as we went until I was falteringly forcing my fingers to play broken chords in imitation of triple and quadruple stops, something I had only recently mastered when I had lost the ability to play.

Surprise appeared in his gaze at my attempt, and the grin still stretching across my face somehow got wider as the technique slowly came back to me until I could play the broken chords as I had the last time I had picked up an instrument—for the moment, anyway. It would take quite a bit of practice to convert the quick short-term memory I had established to true muscle memory, but it was a start.

I had my music back.

My fingers complaining from the unusual positions, I flexed and stretched as I grabbed a high stool from near his chemistry table and seated myself on it instead of on the arm of the settee. With my weight off my bad leg, I slowly started recalling the songs I had played most often so many years before, losing myself again in the melodies, though I soon noticed Holmes had begun harmonizing again.

After several songs, I quickly reached the limit on the ones I could recall offhand and started searching for something else to play. Realizing my difficulty, Holmes struck up a simple tune of his own, and I began harmonizing with him. Time flew by as notes filled the room, nearly vibrating the air with their intensity. A passing thought was grateful Mrs. Hudson had gone out for the day, because it meant there was no need to stop playing before I was ready out of consideration to her, and I began attempting a looping harmony around the jaunty tune Holmes had started up.

It had been so long since I had last played that I had long before lost the calluses, muscle strength, and endurance with the instrument, and I was just beginning to think about taking a break when Holmes struck up another tune, one I thought I recognized, impossibly. The tune was familiar in the way all of Holmes’ improvisation carried the same underlying feel, so I knew he was not playing some established piece, but I was also entirely certain that he had never played this tune for me before.

I froze in my attempts to harmonize, trying to remember where I had heard it. I had heard the tune before, I was positive, but somehow I had no memory of actually _hearing_ it. It was almost as if I had dreamt it.

Dreamt it. The idea lodged, and I pondered it. How could I have dreamt a tune I had never heard?

Holmes had not yet noticed I had stopped playing and, as the song unfolded, a memory slowly came to me of seeing Holmes walking toward me in a park, playing a tune I had just played in a duel.

In a duel? That made no sense. I had stopped playing well before I had met Holmes, and I had never taken part in the competitions where dueling was common, in spite of the time Harry had tried to sign me up for one. I followed the memory back, searching for more context to place it, and a vague memory came of dueling with a cello, with my father’s cello.

I never heard my father play the cello I had found in the attic shortly after learning to play the viola, and I thought harder, trying to place the memory in time instead of place.

Dreamt it. The idea came back, pushing itself into my concentration. That was it, I had dreamed a duel with my father, but how could it have included a tune I had never heard? Unless…

My fever, when I had been so ill last winter. Could it have been a fever dream?

“Watson?” Holmes’ voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and I focused to find him staring at me, violin halted in the middle of a note. “Alright, Watson?”

There was only one way to find out. I picked up the viola again and started his song where he had left off, playing from a memory of a dream.

The surprise in his gaze was answer enough, and I continued playing. He joined me after a long moment, and we eventually began looping the chorus as I had heard in my dream. Over and over, we played in ever more complicated spirals until I lost coordination and ended the song.

The surprise remained in his gaze as he stared at me. “You were awake?”

I shook my head. “I dreamed it, and only just recalled the dream. You played that when I was sick.”

It was a question more than a statement, and Holmes nodded. “You were so restless that I hoped it would calm you. It seemed to work, but then your fever spiked.”

“And it changed into a nightmare,” I finished softly, more of the dream coming back to me. “And the voice…That was real? That was you?”

“What voice?”

I moved from the stool to my armchair, sinking into the cushion and laying the viola across my lap. A glance at the mantle clock revealed several hours had passed. No wonder everything ached.

“The dream,” I replied, stumbling over my words as I fought to recall the details, “it was…disjointed but logical. I was on a stage performing. A duet with my father became a duel. I never heard him play, and I knew that in the dream, so to make the duel last longer, I started looping the chorus. When it finally ended, he walked off the stage and out of the auditorium, taking my mother and brother with him. Their loss combined with the scar tissue in my shoulder, and I found myself alone and unable to play, so I left. I sat on a bench in the park, watching everyone else and wondering what I would do now that I was alone again. I didn’t want to be there, but I had nowhere to go…” I let the thought trail off as more details came back to me. “Through most of the dream, there was a voice in the background, talking to me, telling stories, pleading, demanding, rambling. I could rarely understand the words, but even—” I remembered the worst nightmare, at the falls, and again I tripped over my words, “even the worst dream, which came later, which offered a choice, had the voice in the background, present if not always understandable. It was the voice that dictated my choice in that dream, not me. I wanted—”

I dropped the thought, realizing just what had been going on while I was in that dream, and Holmes looked up at me.

“You wanted?” he asked.

I hesitated, unsure how to voice what I had nearly blurted. How could I convey that he had brought me back? It was simple even for me to figure out that the crisis had been my choice at the falls in my dream, and the only reason I had returned from that had been hearing his voice pleading for me to come back. How could I tell him all of that when the conversation itself would only make him uncomfortable?

“Watson?”

I looked up to find a hesitant question in his gaze. He already knew what I had nearly said, but he was trying to deny it, trying to hope I had nearly said something else. I could see that, and I thought for a moment, running through what I remembered of the dreams as I decided what I wanted to tell him.

“I was at the falls,” I finally said quietly, “but Mary wasn’t waiting for me in London. I was alone, and there was no reason for me to ever leave the falls, no reason for me to come back to London.”

He flinched at the last few words, and I could see in his gaze that I had just confirmed his suspicions. The collected front he used to cover his emotions dropped slightly, allowing me to see a piece of the fear he had felt sitting by my sickbed, and his hand tightened on his violin. A tense silence fell over the sitting room, each of us caught for a moment in our own thoughts.

Pulling myself out of the memory of the dream, I saw Holmes staring through me, his gaze far away, likely thinking about the hours he had spent by my bed.

“Holmes?” His gaze refocused on me. “Thank you,” I said simply, then, readjusting myself to play from the armchair, I launched into a slightly simpler variation of the song he had played, one which my off-handed coordination could easily manage.

He joined me, weaving a countermelody around my own, and I knew he understood I was referring to much, much more than just the viola.

**Author's Note:**

> I do not play a stringed instrument, so if I have any of the terms wrong, please let me know so i can fix it
> 
> Feedback is always greatly appreciated :)


End file.
